Why has Cinema Dissed Karl Marx?

Nothing that comes to mind in western cineman – not sympathetic nor negative in depiction.

There have been movies about Che Guevara, including a very bad right wing hit movie entitled “Che” in which Omar Sharif played Castro and was contractually forced to utter lines like “the revolutionary and the peasant are like the flower and the bee – neither can propogate without the other.”

There was a movie about Rosa Luxembourg. One about John Reed. Lenin has been depicted, including a very nuanced depiction in the old BBC series The Life of Reilly (the real life character upon which James Bond is loosely based). There was a sympathetic depiction of Trostky in Frida. But nothing, positive or negative, about Marx – not even by CP/fellow travellor movie makers cranking out agit prop films like Salt of the Earth or Burn!.

There have been plenty of depiction of Hitler. I can only think of one depiction of Stalin in Children of the Revolution. Oh, actually there was a depiction in The Life of Reilly – not so nuanced, but then he wasn’t very nuanced in real life.

Wikipedia has an entry re Marx in film, but it’s mostly documentary, though there’s apparently something which may be in the works – Haitian director Raoul Peck has apparently been working on a bio-film since 2007.

But whatever your views on the person, he is a fascinating character – much drama in his life – and for better or worse has had a profound impact on the whole planet and its course of history. Why the absence of treatment?

17 comments

Go ahead, use the “M” word in America; see where that gets ya. The people in charge of the “Cinema” and the “Networks” are “know-nothings” if they can label you a “Marxist” they feel they’ve won.
In today’s America: “Stupidity is king.” just look at the level of discussion with the republicans. Or the Democrats for that matter.
I feel it’s in the interest of the 1% (who are not dumb) to promote US stupidity.

Maybe because philosophers are boring. When was the last time you saw a movie about Kant, Hegel or Heidegger? Marx never led a revolution, a country or even a rebellion. Thinking doesn’t translate well to the silver screen.

Years ago, there would generally be one Marxist professor on the economics staff at most colleges, who was tolerated as a kind of crazy uncle. Nowadays, in the economics community, it is taboo to acknowledge that anything about Marx’s thinking might have some validity or might be worthy of further investigation. Not talking about the workers paradise stuff, but about the tendency of capitalism toward consolidation and monopoly and vast supplies of low wage labor and big-time inequality of wealth.

You may see him as a facinating persona. But really, he wouldn’t be any more famous than any other 19th century economist such as David Ricardo, except for the movements that claimed his name, i.e., USSR, Red China, Cuba, etc.

And it has nothing to do with what moviedad said about Hollywood either, or the USA. Many movie companies, domestic or foreign, haven’t made movies about Karl Marx. Maybe there’s nothing to dramatize about him.

And since the upcoming movie is in production, I don’t see what the big fracking deal is.

Oh, no, there was plenty of fascinating drama in his life. There are half a dozen biographies, and plenty of makings for a movie.

My theory is that nobody wants to touch it because there’s no room for nuance or objectivity in the depiction. His followers will slam any nuance as an attack, and his detractors will frame anything which doesn’t demonize him as a softball propaganda piece. Nobody is interested in the fascinating humanity involved – his intensity, his brilliance, his hypocrisy, etc. It’s not the story anybody with a stake in the historical image wants to deal with.

It’s probably the same reason there hasn’t been any real biographical movie about George Washington for instance (Although the nuanced PBS production of Washington about the Battle of Trenton, where he was played by Jeff Daniels, was close to what I would like to see, if it was a large production it would have been controversial), and only cardboard movies about Lincoln. You don’t mess with icons, and Marx is both a positive and negative icon – perhaps the most influential of any icon from a global perspective.

I think General Smedley Butler’s life story would make one hell of a movie plot. From his days as a gung-ho participant in numerous U.S. military adventures and his status as the nation’s most-decorated Marine, to his transformation to being one of the nation’s most outspoken opponents of imperialist foreign policy and war, his leadership in the Bonus Army movement, his book “War is a Racket,” his exposure of the alleged Banker’s Plot to assasinate FDR and install a puppet government, it seems like it would make for an extremely compelling story.

Battlefield bravado, radical transformation, conflict, comntroversy, intrigue and suspense at the highest levels of government, what more could a movie producer ask for? Okay, maybe a love interest — and he was married, so presumably there was some romance and courtship in there somewere.

Seriously, it seems like the right filmmaker could stay completely true to the historical facts, no real embellishment required, and yet come up with something that was informative and inspiring, but also the kind of crowd-pleaser that could draw a mainstream audience.

But very few people hold a negative image of Christ – even non-believers. And it’s going to be compelling anyway, because everyone already knows the story.

The question is whom to market to with regard to Marx. The majority of people who take interest in the subject want him slammed or revered. Anything in between might interest a few professors and intellectuals, but otherwise, the only real interest is in the icon, not the man.

At least in the U.S., I doubt that there are really all that many people nowadays who want to see Marx “revered.”

I suspect that the vast majority of Americans would fall under the heading “not really interested in the first place,” which is probably the major barrier to a mass-market film about Marx.

I think the next largest group would be the “slammers,” who would only be satisfied with a completely negative treatment.

The third largest group would be those people, including the academic / intellectual crowd you referred to, as well as most in the “mainstream” left, who recognize his importance historically, but certainly don’t “revere” him.

And then the smallest group would be those who actually do “revere” him and would be upset at anything less than a hagiography.

I don’t know how big the group is that revere him, but I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble over the years for even the mildest of criticisms. I really pissed off a member of the League of Revolutionary Struggle way back during Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign. He was proselytizing to a student and I wandered into the conversation as he was trying to explain “historical materialism.” I commented that probably one of the biggest items of bullshit in the mix was the theory that we and class struggle exist in the “prehistory of man” which would come to a close upon the absence of class struggle. The guy turns to the student, literally puts his hand between the student and me and says, “Marx never said that.”

I started wondering if maybe I had misread it. I thought it was in the Communist Manifesto, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I didn’t have the Internet at the time, but I did find an anthology of Marx and Engels with a big index and there it was in an essay entitled something like “Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy” or something equally boring.

So days later when I brought the book from the library to a campaign meeting, he refused to look at it! Absolutely refused. Held his hands up as if even touching the book would infect him with heresy.

More recently I was accused of slandering Marx when I pointed out that he had endorsed the election of President Lincoln. The guy was actually pretty angry.

So maybe the group isn’t that large. I just seem to run into them all the time, online and off.

Actually, it was a BBC miniseries called – Reilly Ace of Spies that was then run on PBS. It is one of my all time favorites. I even have the DVD release. Great series that showed, among other things, the brutality of the revolution and how close to failure it was at so many junctures. Knowing what was to come, it is interesting to spectulate how things would have been different historically if the Reds hadn’t come to power.

Despite all the drawbacks, if you put some naked women in the film and have Johnny Depp play the lead, you could get both men and women to see it. Put some fighting and explosions and you might even make some money. Can we work Jet Li in there somehow?

You’re 3:48 is very funny, and all too believable. “Facts?! Run!!!!” We’ve been seeing it play out among the zealots of the right lately, maybe because there are more of them these days then zealots of the left.

I completely agree with tra that America NEEDS to see a movie based on the life of Smedley Butler. It would have the same impact as the finest propaganda, with the added advantage that it could be completely historically factual, and come out with an associated book to document the facts.